Futuristic Words

One of the students in my Breakthrough Comfort course this weekend asked me how to find his passion. It’s a tough question to answer, but I feel like it comes from looking your fear dead in the eye and marching or sprinting toward it. But that’s not quite right, because then you would walk down dark alleyways in Compton for no reason at all. It’s more like your passion is usually where your desires are occluded in your mind’s eye by fear. I don’t think it’s possible to be passionate something over the long term if that something doesn’t promote change, and change is bed buddies with fear.

Apprehending your personal destiny seems to be about the unflinching and unapologetic pursuit of passion while bowing before the caprice of the universe. A lot of people like to puff their chests and crow, “I control my own destiny!” but they are fools to a man. No one truly controls the path of his own life. From the beginning, you did not choose your family or the circumstances into which you were born, and unless you make very specific decisions, most of which involve suicide, you don’t get to choose when you stand before St. Peter and/or headbang with GG Allin and Hitler.* Real humility in the face of the universe’s caprice, then, is living in the full light of the knowledge that your time here is limited, your specific existence is thus rare and precious. Every minute we take for granted is a kind of idolatry of the self. In those moments where we allow ourselves boredom or ennui or lethargy of the spirit, we stretch our lives past infinity, unburdened with grateful responsibility because as long as we are healthy and well and comfortable surely we cannot die.

This is living religiously. The metaphor of Christ or Allah or Yahweh is powerful, and there are clues to aid in good living in every religious text. Far be it from me to declare anyone’s path to the divine wrong. But the main point of religion seems to be our attempt as a species to wrestle with the notion of our consciousness as meaningful in the face of its inevitable termination. We have power and agency, the ability to generate well-being and love for others, the ability to fuck and fight… and then a plane obliterates a building on a perfect Tuesday morning or that IED goes off or a 60 foot wave reminds you that Mama Nature always has the last word or we’re sorry sir, it’s malignant and inoperable or you just talked to her this morning how can she be dead? Living to the fullest is supposed to be hard, although we tend to overcomplicate it, which makes it harder. We must accept our full impact and agency, the mighty extent of our abilities, even as we bow our heads to the impossible plan of the universe. Somewhere in there is what we call worship. For some people, it’s easier to name it and give it a face and call it God, but it’s always a name for that thing that is greater than any one of us or all of us and yet is a part of us, even if certain nomenclatures make you think of red states or social contagions or suicide bombers or Glenn Beck.

I’m not saying, by the way, that if you kneel before the might of the universe you will get girls, even though this is my Love Systems blog. The part that will be alluring the fairer sex is the part where you accept the full impact of your agency and kick the doors of life wide open. The deeper element of that, though, is that I’m not sure it’s possible to do said kicking without appreciating, even on a subconscious level, how tenuous our position on this rock really is. So the part that makes you appealing to women is the part where you answer the question, “What would you do with your life if you only had one shot. Because you do.”

*—Fun fact: St. Peter’s cross is an inverted Latin cross. Contemporary culture attributes this symbol to Satanism or the anti-Christ, but the original meaning was a reference to Peter’s denial of Jesus and his sense that he was unfit to be crucified like Jesus. This begs the question as to whether anyone should get to choose the ornamentation of their execution method. If I die from lethal injection, for instance, can I request a mixture of UV-reactive compound be added to the poison so my funeral can be a bitchin’ rave where I leave a glowing corpse? I mean, presumably the people crucifying (remember: this is where you pound metal into someone’s arms and legs so they are nailed to pieces of wood) did not like Peter. If they were feeling so charitable, and I were Peter, I would probably say, “You know, never mind inverting the cross. Let’s talk about not putting me on it to begin with, nowhatI’msayin’?” Come to think of it, he was probably just punking whatever newbie Roman soldier was on cross detail. Crucifixion is ugly business, and I imagine the effects of gravity on blood in a post-mortem victim of crucifixion are unpleasant in the extreme. Think head engorged with fluid, eyes popping out, tongue lolling, also filled with blood. And God knows what would happen to brain or ears or neck. The newbie probably arrived at Peter’s corpse, expecting something normal only to find Ashton Kutcher and friends pointing and laughing.**

**—$10 to anyone who gets laid using that footnote as an attraction routine.

Our workshop took us to a rooftop bar. The weather in New York threatened rain all day, so the venue had wisely erected giant umbrellas. Droplets teased us like air conditioner condensation from Heaven. A few of the students wanted to see me approach and open because while they had witnessed me wading through the Emotional Progression Model in a few interactions they hadn’t seen me work from a standing start. I looked around and walked toward the prettiest girl I could see outside the umbrellas, i.e. where the students could get a good view. She was wearing a tight white dress and hoop earrings. Her friends were a tiny girl in a red dress and a large man with a military moustache and a designer shirt.

“Hey, trouble,” I said…

…The students watched as I asked for her name and spun her and asked the normal questions but in statement form. “You look like you’re from out west. Not the Midwest, but more like Idaho or Montana. You have a kind way, but you seem hard.” I was wrong– she was from Long Island– but that didn’t matter.* We were cuddling in short order before her friend swooped in.

“She’s mine!” said the little girl draped in red.

“Suit yourself,” I said. “I’ve been telling her to get away from me.”

At this point Big Business tried to intercept. My girl in white was enthralled with me despite the interruption.**  I looked to the friends to make sure everything was okay. Her tall man-friend looked on with what I thought was approval. “You better take her number, dude. It looks like she really likes you!”

We chatted more. An attractive couple I had chatted with earlier in the night walked by and, as I asked them to do if they saw me with a cute girl, started cooing and praising me, demanding this girl see my stand-up comedy show.

Soon we were kissing in the rain. Hands, hair, and coy smiles.

“Okay,” I said. “Your friends are vanishing, and my friends are about to pull me away. I better do what your friend said. But we can’t ever talk to each other because it could be the end of the world. You really should stay awa from me.” She gave me her number, and I purposely made a mistake, which she corrected.

She walked back to her friends with my hand in hers. I still had my phone out and said, “I got it,” while making eye contact with her male friend, my co-conspirator.

“What?” he said, his eyes about sixteen shades angrier than I was expecting.

“I got her number like you told me to, killer,” I said. The “r” had not left my mouth before he had knocked my (9$!) drink out of my hand. My eyes widened, and I took a step back, dropping my copy of Blood Meridian and holding my hands up, never breaking eye contact. He’d been drinking, and he wasn’t puffing up or shouting. He just stared and sneered, snapping at his two friends.

The girl in red came quickly to me. “They’re in a relationship,” she said and went back to calm the guy down.

“Dude, I’m sorry,” I said, my hands still up.

“Fuck you,” he said.

Two other instructors dashed forward and tried to smooth things over. Calabrese repeated a few times, “Everything’s cool, man. Just walk away,” and the three eventually left, although the guy was still steaming and muttering bitterness to the girl in white.

Even in the immediate aftermath, I didn’t hold any malice toward the guy. How could I when he gave me my new favorite story? If anything, I empathized with this man with the unfortunate facial hair. While I’ve never been in that exact situation, I was in a relationship for a long time where the girl flaunted her sexual power in extremely painful ways. Like this guy, I had anger toward my girlfriend, but my real rage was directed to the guys who were putting their hands and cocks in and on My Girl. With her I had fitful conversations where I begged her to please, if she could maybe stop screwing or blowing anyone who showed her he bought condoms, that would be super. That frustration was a different experience from the need to wipe the slate clean, to abolish with blood her pristine(?) essence from the filthy hands of those thuggish interlopers who had the audacity to seduce her.

I hope this was a catalyst, that he’s telling his friends about tonight a year from now.  I hope this is the light from the sky where he realizes that she doesn’t really respect him, and he owes himself better than to invest energy and emotion in a girlfriend willing and eager to exhibit that sort of behavior.

That’s unlikely, though.

Tonight was probably just another tear in his tattered self-worth, yet another reminder that he is less than they both wish he was. For the rest of the night, I started my conversations by asking who was more fucked up in that situation. Girls unanimously said the girl was vastly more wrong, and guys were usually silent if they weren’t fist-pounding me. But I’m not so sure. Yes, she was wrong in that moment, but that moment isn’t their story. The really egregious business doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens during backed up traffic or missed appointments or flirting with friends or impatience with a bartender or waiter. The seeds of contemptuous behavior are strewn through every day, every interaction. All the worst crimes of a relationship are symptomatic of something else, unmet needs deeper in the core.

Good luck, sir, wherever you are, and peace be unto you. I appreciate that you didn’t take a shot at me… but I would have understood.

[UPDATE: Big Business feels it's appropriate to add that the girl in red and the guy were being, um, unpleasant. And they were. They were EXTREMELY antagonistic and saying ugly things to him and me, although I didn't hear it. Really, these just weren't the most charming people at the bar that night, the girl's tight white dress aside. Still, I think the guy's hostility is still a reflection of his overall insecurity and weakness, reflected yet again in his eagerness to turn his frustration into violence. Despite his douchery, I am compelled toward empathy because no one-- and I mean no one-- should have to watch his girlfriend make out with another guy right before his eyes.]

*– The key is to avoid the Routine Everyone Else Uses, and get the boring stuff answered in an interesting way. There are a whole slew of examples for this in the LS Routines Manual, by the way. My favorite, and the one I contributed to the LSRM, is to wildly and utterly confuse races, i.e. say a girl with an obvious African accent is from Korean, &c.

**– It is boring to recap. I was just spewing obvious sexual intent and pushing her away when the moment was right.